The late spring/early summer of 1995 must have been a slow period in the music biz because the top ten albums didn't change all that much. Looking through the Billboard top album sales, I won't have a new album to review until June 16th.

In the meantime, it's never the wrong time to listen to some albums that are great but I haven't reviewed. For example, The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails was released over a year ago at #2, but I didn't review it because it was eclipsed by Superunknown by Soundgarden at #1. The Downward Spiral quickly fell out of the top ten so I didn't formally review it. Briefly, it's a great album, go listen to it!

I'm not going to belabor this. This week's album at #2 is the soundtrack for the 1995 buddy comedy Friday. I have not seen the movie, but the consensus seems that it wasn't horrible. The soundtrack is nothing special. Apparently the track Keep Their Heads Ringin' was a hit although I don't remember it.

You can skip this album.

The only song I remember hearing off the #6 album this week is More Human Than Human. I don't think I've heard it in a long, long time. After listening to the entirety of Astro Creep: 2000 Songs Of Love, Destruction And Other Synthetic Delusions Of The Electric Head, I am not disappointed that my exposure to White Zombie has not been comprehensive. I did not like this album much and I can't recommend it.

The documentation for polars is not the best, and figuring out how to do this below took me over an hour. Here's how to read in a headerless csv file into a LazyFrame using scan_csv and write it to a parquet file using sink_parquet. The key is to use with_column_names and schema_overrides. Despite what the documentation says, using schema doesn't work as you might imagine and sink_parquet returns with a cryptic error about the dataframe missing column a.

This is just a simplified version of what I actually am trying to do, but that's the best way to drill down to the issue. Maybe the search engines will find this and save someone else an hour of frustration.

import numpy as np
import polars as pl

df = pl.DataFrame(
    {"a": [str(i) for i in np.arange(10)], "b": np.random.random(10)},
)
df.write_csv("/tmp/stuff.csv", include_header=False)

lf = pl.scan_csv(
    "/tmp/stuff.csv",
    has_header=False,
    schema_overrides={
        "a": pl.String,
        "b": pl.Float64,
    },
    with_column_names=lambda _: ["a", "b"],
)

lf.sink_parquet("/tmp/stuff.parquet")

When I saw the #6 album for this week, I said "I've never heard of John Michael Montgomery," but that's not true. Last year I reviewed All-4-One which included a cover of I Swear that was written and originally performed by John Michael Montgomery. I mentioned this in my review, but 10 months later his name did not remain embedded in my memory.

I Swear isn't on this eponymous album, but I Can Love You Like That is, which was also covered by All-4-One to great success. Playing this album I Can Love You Like That seemed familiar, but I'm not sure if it was the Country or R&B version I have heard before. All-4-One has many thanks to give John Michael Montgomery!

Outside of the All-4-One/John Michael Montgomery connection, I find nothing interesting about this album. It's not bad, but it's nothing special. The first line of the first song includes the words "I drive a pickup truck." This album was not trying to break new ground. If you're into this kind of Country music, I'm sure it delivers. I'm not, so it doesn't for me, and I can't recommend this album.

There were no new albums in the top ten last week, but this week another new hip-hop album debuts in the top ten, this time at #7. Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version by Ol' Dirty Bastard was his debut solo record. He was a member of Wu-Tang Clan from its founding until his death in 2004.

This review is basically a repeat of my last review. Like 2Pac, I was never into Ol' Dirty Bastard (nor Wu-Tang), and listening to this album hasn't changed my mind thirty years later. I acknowledge that Wu-Tang and Ol' Dirty Bastard are important to the history of hip-hop, and that alone means they're worth listening to at least once, but I'm just not into them.

A few weeks ago I started playing with Claude Code, which is an AI tool that can help build software projects for/with you. Like ChatGPT, you interact with the AI conversationally, using whole sentences. You can tell it what programming language and which software packages to use, and what you want the new program to do.

I started by asking it to build a mortgage calculator using Python and Dash. Python is one of the most popular programming languages and Dash is an open source Python package that combines Flask, a tool to build websites using Python, and Plotly, a tool that builds high-quality interactive web plots. The killer feature of Dash is that it handles all the nasty and tedious parts of an interactive webpage (meaning Javascript, eeeek!). It deals with webpage button clicks and form submissions for you, and you, the coder, can write things in lovely Python.

With a fair amount of back and forth Claude Code built this advanced mortgage calculator, which is only sorta kinda functional. It does a fair amount of what I asked it to do, but it also doesn't do a fair amount of what I asked it to do, and it has a decent number of bugs. The good things it did was handle some of the tedious boiler plate stuff like creating the necessary directory hierarchy and files, including a README.md detailing how to run the software. Creating a Dash webpage requires writing Python function(s) and a template detailing how to insert the output of the function(s) into a webpage, and Claude Code handled that with aplomb.

What it didn't handle well was more complicated things, like asking it to write an optimizer for funding/paying off a mortgage considering various funding sources and economic factors. It also didn't write the code using standard Python practices. The first time I looked at the code using VS Code and Ruff, Ruff reported over 1,000 style violations. If I found a bug in the code, some of the time I could tell Claude to fix it, and it would, but other times, it would simply fail. Altogether there's about 6,000 lines of code, and as the project got bigger it was clear that Claude was struggling. Simply put, there's a limit of the size or complexity of a codebase that Claude can handle. Humans are not going to be replaced, yet.

At this point I'm not sure what I'll do with the financial calculator. I don't think Claude can help me any more, so I'd have to manually dive in to fix bugs and improve it, and I haven't decided if I will. In summary, my impression of Claude is that it's decent at creating the base of a project or application, but then anything truly creative and complicated is beyond what it can do.

Claude Code isn't free (they give you $5 to start) and I had to deposit money to make this tool. I still have a bit of money to spend, so let's try a few tasks and see how Claude does. I've uploaded all of the code generated below to this repository.

Simple Calculator

I asked it to create a simple web-based calculator, and at a cost of $0.17, here is what it created that works well (that's not a picture below, try clicking on the buttons!).

Simple C Hello World!

Create a template for a program in C. Include a makefile and a main.c file with a main function that prints a simple "hello world!". $0.08 later it performed this simple task flawlessly.

Excel Telescope Angular Resolution

Create an Excel file that can calculate the angular resolution of a reflector telescope as a function of A) the diameter of the primary mirror and B) the altitude of the telescope. It went off and thought for a bit, and spent another $0.17 of my money. It output a file with a ".xlsx" extension, but the file can't be opened. Looking at the output of Claude, I suspect that this may be a file formatting issue because Claude is designed to handle text file output rather than binary.

Text to Speech

Seeing that Claude struggled with creating binary output, next I asked it to create a Jupyter notebook (Jupyter notebooks have the extension .ipynb but they're actually text files) that uses Python and any required packages and can take a block of text and use text to speech to output the text to a sound file. This succeeded ($0.12), and in particular used gTTS (Google Text To Speech) to do the heavy lifting.

Rust Parallel Pi Calculator

Write a program in Rust that uses Monte Carlo techniques to calculate pi. Use multithreading. The input to the program should be the desired number of digits of pi, and the output is pi to that many digits. $0.11 later, I got a Rust program that crashes with a "attempt to multiply with overflow" error. Not great! I could interact with Claude and ask it to try to fix the error, but I haven't.

Baseball Scoresheet Web App

Create a web app for keeping score of a baseball game. Make the page resemble a baseball scoresheet. Use a SQLite database file to store the data. Make the page responsive such that each scoring action is saved immediately to the database. At a cost of $0.93, it output almost 2,000 lines of code. The resulting npm web app doesn't work. Upon initial page load it asks the user to enter player names, numbers, and positions, but no matter what you do, you cannot get past that. Bummer!

Random Number Generator

It looks like the more complicated the ask gets, the worse Claude gets. Here's one more thing I'll try that I have no idea how to do myself. We'll see how well Claude does at it. Create a Mac OS program that generates a truly random floating point number. It should not use a pseudo-random number generator. It should capture random input from the user as the source of randomness. It should give the user the option of typing random keyboard keys, or mouse movements, or making noises captured by the microphone. Please use the swift programming language. Create a Xcode compatible development stack. Create a stylish GUI that looks like a first-class Mac OS program. $0.81 later, and asking it to fix one bug, led to a second try that was also broken with 10 bugs. Clearly, I've pushed Claude past its breaking point.

I'm guessing that all of the broken code can be fixed, maybe by Claude itself, but it ultimately might require human intervention in some cases. I'm optimistic that it could fix the Rust/pi bug, but I'm not optimistic that it can fix the baseball nor random number generator stuff. AI code generation might be coming for us eventually, but not today.

There were no new albums in the top ten last week, but this week a new entrant rockets to #1. I was never that into 2Pac, and listening to this album this week hasn't changed my mind. I acknowledge that he was one of the best at his craft, and I like some of his contemporaries in hip-hop, but for whatever reason 2Pac just doesn't do it for me.

Considering his historical importance it's probably worth your time familiarizing yourself with 2Pac, but I personally don't endorse his music.

Here's a bunch of various kid art for March 2025. It appears that a few browsers on MacOS, including Chrome, Opera, and Vivaldi, have issues with the black and white avif images below. Firefox and Safari appear to work just fine. Enjoy!

Last week there was no new album in the top ten, but this week a new arrival shot straight to the top. Released in 1995, this was the first "Greatest Hits" album by Bruce Springsteen. In the thirty years since quite a few more have been released.

Springsteen certainly wasn't at peak popularity in 1995, his most recent albums released in 1992 (Human Touch and Lucky Town) didn't match the success of his earlier work. His contribution of the song Streets of Philadelphia to the film of the same name in 1993 definitely helped keep him relevant. A decade removed from his best and most popular album was probably a good time to revisit his twenty years of music. Many critics dislike compilation/best of albums, but they are obviously very popular with consumers.

Springsteen is currently my #1 most listened to artist on last.fm. I am obviously biased in favor of his music. My favorite Springsteen compilation album is probably The Promise, but this first Greatest Hits album is a good collection of the best of his first two decades of songs.

Thinking back I wasn't into Springsteen in 1995 as much as I am now. When I was a teenager his kind of rock music wasn't in fashion and it took me until the wisdom of adulthood to discover it.

I don't necessarily recommend this exact compilation of Springsteen, but I do recommend listening to his library. A more recent Greatest Hits from 2024 is another good choice, especially in the 31 song digital version. You should check it out!

According to the chart, Throwing Copper by Live had been out for almost a year (43 weeks) before it cracked the top ten. The good news for Live was that their trajectory continued upwards all the way to the top. According to wikipedia the album took 52 weeks to reach #1 in May, 1995.

I seem to remember some rumblings when this album was popular that Live was secretly a Christian rock band that was crossing over to the mainstream, and that some of the songs like Lightning Crashes were anti-abortion songs. Reading the wikipedia page for Lightning Crashes, it seems that some of that confusion might have come from the music video. In truth the song was dedicated to a high school friend of the lead singer who was killed by a drunk driver.

My opinion of Live has perhaps been tainted by these rumblings and I never got into deeply their music. My listening count for Live is small and a few of their contemporaries have quite a bit more plays from me, like Collective Soul, Bush, and Counting Crows. Listening now I think the music is just a bit too corny and just a bit over the top for me.

My recommendation is that Throwing Copper is worth a stream, but it's not spectacular. It is very 90s, and it is fun to re-discover some of Live's music from thirty years ago.

Almost a year ago I linked to Finale which is an iOS app that listens to the music you're playing and auto-scrobbles to last.fm using song recognition methods similar to Shazam or SoundHound. It works decently well, but it requires two devices: your iOS device (which can't be playing music), and something playing music over speakers. With these limitations its utility is somewhat stunted.

Recently I discovered RadioX 5, which is a Mac OS internet radio streaming application that includes the ability to scrobble plays to last.fm. It has many other features but this one is key for me. It lives in the menubar so it's very unobtrusive. The one disappointment is that it doesn't automatically scrobble songs — you need to manually hit the red circular last.fm icon in the app to save the play. At first this seems like a a huge omission, but without some external way of knowing what is a song and isn't, the application would end up scrobbling non-songs. For example, below is what the application shows when the DJ is speaking between songs on The Colorado Sound (I don't know why the cover art is for Lynyrd Skynyrd, it wasn't played before or after the DJ interlude). I wouldn't want to scrobble the non-song "The Colorado Sound" by the non-artist "The Colorado Sound."

Short of access to a comprehensive database of global artists+songs titles, which if it exists I'll bet wouldn't be cheap for programmatic use, I can think of one way that might allow for auto-scrobbling. If the application had a way to prevent scrobbling for a particular artist+song combination set by the user, probably custom to each radio station, then auto-scrobbling everything else might be practical.

In a three months (thirty years ago) Cracked Rear View by Hootie & the Blowfish will hit #1, but this week it is only at #7. Looking at the last.fm page for Hootie & the Blowfish the top comment says "Damn...their one album sold more copies than they have plays on Last.fm" which equally true and revealing. As of this writing, they have 7.6 million scrobbles on last.fm, while Cracked Rear View has sold over 20 million copies. Working the math, this means that if all of Hootie's scrobbles came from playing a copy of Cracked Rear View just once, only 3% of those albums sold have been played while last.fm has existed. Clearly, Hootie's popularity is not what it once was.

Of course, this is not how scrobbling works; last.fm didn't exist when the album was released and only a fraction of music listeners bother to scrobble their plays. Also, I don't want to emphasize scrobble counts too much: The Beatles have 842 million scrobbles and Taylor Swift has 2.86 billion. I would hope that even Taylor Swift would admit that The Beatles are far and away more important, consequential, and everlasting (and honestly better) than she is. The only real thing we can read from Hootie's scrobble count is that they have fallen out of the current musical zeitgeist.

Like most last.fm users, my listening history for Hootie is pretty thin. I had only 17 plays prior to listening to this album, which averages to less than one play per year. I remember being aware of Hootie when it came out and hearing the songs on the radio, but they were not what I purposely listened to. Thirty years later, I don't think my opinions have changed all that much. Hootie is fine, but doesn't move me nor does it grab my attention. This album gets a big "meh" from me, I recommend that you listen to it, or don't, whatever, I don't care.

This week we drop down to the #7 album Cocktails by Too $hort. Before listening to this album I had exactly zero Too $hort plays recorded on last.fm. I recall him being somewhat popular thirty-ish years ago, but clearly I haven't thought about him much since then.

Thirty years later, I can't say that his music has grown on me. It's quite misogynistic and explicit about how he treats women. Don't get me wrong, I don't subscribe to moral panics and music. I don't think that just because I don't like this music it should be banned, censored, or otherwise. A lot of music tells stories, which includes boasting, and there are different ways to do that in different musical genres. I just don't dig his way of telling stories, and his stories don't interest me.

My recommendation is to skip listening to this album. Instead, why don't you spin up Wildflowers by Tom Petty? It peaked at #8 in December 1994, and dropped down since then. I didn't review it because other un-reviewed albums were higher during the holidays, which was a shame. Wildflowers is a far, far better album than Cocktails, and it deserves your attention. Links to various streaming services are below 👇🏻.

Drawn by Kid #1